Centre de sociologie de l'innovation

Dedicated to the controversial question of whether economics is performative - of whether, in some cases, economics actually produces the phenomena it analyzes, this book features case studies that intend to offer substance to the notion of the performativity of economics in an accessible, nontechnical way.

Controversies over such issues as nuclear waste, genetically modified organisms, asbestos, tobacco, gene therapy, avian flu, and cell phone towers arise almost daily as rapid scientific and technological advances create uncertainty and bring about unforeseen concerns. The authors of Acting in an Uncertain World argue that political institutions must be expanded and improved to manage these controversies, to transform them into productive conversations, and to bring about "technical democracy." They show how "hybrid forums"—in which experts, non-experts, ordinary citizens, and politicians come together—reveal the limits of traditional delegative democracies, in which decisions are made by quasi-professional politicians and techno-scientific information is the domain of specialists in laboratories. The division between professionals and laypeople, the authors claim, is simply outmoded.\n\nThe authors argue that laboratory research should be complemented by everyday experimentation pursued in the real world, and they describe various modes of cooperation between the two. They explore a range of concrete examples of hybrid forums that have dealt with sociotechnical controversies including nuclear waste disposal in France, industrial waste and birth defects in Japan, a childhood leukemia cluster in Woburn, Massachusetts, and Mad Cow Disease in the United Kingdom. They discuss the implications for political decision making in general, and they describe a "dialogic" democracy that enriches traditional representative democracy. To invent new procedures for consultation and representation, they suggest, is to contribute to an endless process that is necessary for the ongoing democratization of democracy.\n

How to address empirically the calculative character of markets without dissolving it? In our paper, we propose a theoretical framework that helps to deal with markets without suspending their calculative properties. In the first section, we construct a broad definition of calculation, grounded on the anthropology of science and techniques. In the next sections, we apply this definition to three constitutive elements of markets: economic goods, economic agents and economic exchanges. First, we examine the question of the calculability of goods: in order to be calculated, goods must be calculable. In the following section, we introduce the notion of calculative distributed agencies to understand how these calculable goods are actually calculated. Thirdly, we consider the rules and material devices that organize the encounter between (and aggregation of) individual supplies and demands, i.e. the specific organizations that allow for a calculated exchange and a market output. Those three elements define concrete markets as collective organized devices that calculate compromises on the values of goods. In each, we encounter different versions of our broad definition of calculation, which we illustrate with examples, mainly taken from the fields of financial markets and mass retail.

Presented in two parts, this article proposes a research programme devoted to examining ‘processes of economization’. In the first instalment, published in Economy and Society 38(3) (2009), we introduced the notion of ‘economization’. The term refers to the assembly and qualification of actions, devices and analytical/practical descriptions as ‘economic’ by social scientists and market actors. Through an analysis of selected works in anthropology, economics and sociology, we discussed the importance, meaning and framing of economization, unravelling its trace within a variety of disciplinary backgrounds. This second instalment of the article explores what it would mean to move this research programme forward by taking processes of economization as a topic of empirical investigation. Given the vast terrain of relationships that produce its numerous trajectories, to illustrate what such a project would entail we have limited ourselves to the examination of processes we call ‘marketization’. These processes, which constitute but one modality of economization, are discussed here from five vantage points: the things in the market, agencies, encounters, prices and market maintenance.

This article proposes a research programme devoted to examining ‘processes of economization’. In the current instalment we introduce the notion of ‘economization’, which refers to the assembly and qualification of actions, devices and analytical/practical descriptions as ‘economic’ by social scientists and market actors. Through an analysis of selected works in anthropology, economics and sociology, we begin by discussing the importance, meaning and framing of economization, as we unravel its trace within a variety of disciplinary backgrounds. We show how in combination, these works have laid the foundations for the study of economization. The second instalment of the article, to appear in the next volume of Economy and Society, presents a preliminary picture of what it might mean to take processes of economization as a topic of empirical investigation. Given the vast terrain of relationships that produce its numerous trajectories, we will illustrate economization by focusing on only one of its modalities – the one that leads to the establishment of economic markets. With emphasis on the increasingly dominant role of materialities and economic knowledges in processes of market-making, we will analyse the extant work in social studies of ‘marketization’. Marketization is but one case study of economization.

Au début des années 80, un groupe de chercheurs de l’École des mines se penche sur un aspect du monde contemporain négligé par les sciences sociales : les sciences et les techniques. Comment sont-elles produites ? Comment leur validité ou leur efficacité sont-elles établies ? Comment se diffusent-elles ? Comment contribuent-ils à transformer le monde ? Ces travaux donnent naissance à une approche aujourd’hui reconnue : la sociologie de la traduction, dite aussi théorie de l’acteur réseau, avec ses concepts clefs, la traduction, l’intéressement, le script, la controverse, etc. Cette théorie est si féconde que les sciences sociales mobilisent désormais très largement ses concepts, mais aussi ses règles de méthodes et ses outils de travail. Or, nombre de ses textes fondateurs n’étaient pas ou plus disponibles en français. En rassemblant des textes de trois de ses pionniers, Madeleine Akrich, Michel Callon et Bruno Latour, on permettra au lecteur de comprendre les développements de la sociologie de la traduction et la manière dont elle a interrogé le lien social, les machines, les objets, les usagers, les pratiques scientifiques. Pour montrer en conclusion comment cette approche permet de renouveler l’analyse sociologique classique.

Discusses the performativity of economics and proposes theoretical directions to study it from a sociological perspective.

We all know of innovations which either made their creators a fortune or which led to their downfall. It is easy to retrospectively explain success as a stroke of genius or failure as a blatant mistake. Easy in retrospect…but what about innovation in the making? How does the innovator navigate the pitfalls which threaten him?

ABSTRACT The contribution of the field of science and technology studies (STS) to mainstream sociology has so far been slim because of a misunderstanding about what it means to provide a social explanation of a piece of science or of an artefact. The type of explanation possible for religion, art or popular culture no longer works in the case of hard science or technology. This does not mean, it is argued, that science and technology escapes sociological explanation, but that a deep redescription of what is a social explanation is in order. Once this misunderstanding has been clarified, it becomes interesting to measure up the challenge raised by STS to the usual epistemologies social sciences believed necessary for their undertakings. The social sciences imitate the natural sciences in a way that render them unable to profit from the type of objectivity found in the natural sciences. It is argued that by following the STS lead, social sciences may start to imitate the natural sciences in a very different fashion. Once the meanings of ‘social’ and of ‘science’ are reconfigured, the definition of what a ‘social science’ is and what it can do in the political arena is considered. Again it is not by imitating the philosophers of science's ideas of what is a natural science that sociology can be made politically relevant.

The idea of reflexivity has much to offer to the analysis of taste - but reflexivity in its ancient sense, a form neither active nor passive, pointing to an originary state where things, persons, and events have just arrived, with no action, subject or objects yet decided. Objects of taste are not present, inert, available and at our service.They give themselves up, they shy away, they impose themselves. ‘Amateurs’ do not believe things have taste. On the contrary, they make themselves detect them, through a continuous elaboration of procedures that put taste to the test. Understood as reflexive work performed on one’s own attachments, the amateur’s taste is no longer considered (as with so-called ‘critical’ sociology) an arbitrary election which has to be explained by hidden social causes. Rather, it is a collective technique, whose analysis helps us to understand the ways we make ourselves sensitized, to things, to ourselves, to situations and to moments, while simultaneously controlling how those feelings might be shared and discussed with others.

Et s'il fallait enfin tirer les conséquences des crises à répétition que nos sociétés traversent lorsqu'elles sont confrontées aux débordements inattendus des sciences et des techniques ? S'il fallait en finir une bonne fois pour toutes avec la vision héroïque des décisions tranchantes et tranchées que le souverain prend en situation d'incertitude et en toute méconnaissance de cause ? Si Alexandre rengainait son épée, le monde s'effondrerait-il ? Non, mais la démocratie, elle, en ressortirait fortifiée. Tel est le propos des auteurs de ce livre. Ces derniers refusent les traditionnelles oppositions entre spécialistes et profanes, professionnels de la politique et citoyens ordinaires. Ils concentrent plutôt leur attention sur les nouvelles relations entre savoir et pouvoir qui émergent des controverses sociotechniques et sur les procédures inventées pour les traiter. L'enjeu est de taille : faire apparaître les conditions dans lesquelles les sociétés démocratiques vont se rendre capables d'affronter les défis des sciences et des techniques, redéfinir un espace public réunissant non pas des individus désincarnés mais des femmes et des hommes pris dans des histoires singulières. Après l'âge de la démocratie délégative, celui de la démocratie dialogique ?

In this paper we explore the boundary between calculative and noncalculative action by arguing that these are separate but mutually constitutive. By using the notion of qualculation, a neologism coined by Cochoy, we redefine the notion of calculation to include judgment. We then argue that making qualculability is not trivial: that it takes effort to create calculation and judgment. But it also takes effort to consider nonqualculability. Two strategies for achieving nonqualculability are identified, those of rarefaction and proliferation. Rarefaction, illustrated by the cases of Quaker worship and selfless love or agapè, works by withdrawing all qualculative resources. Conversely, proliferation, illustrated by the attribution of cause and responsibility after railway accidents, and by a major television fund-raiser, the ‘Téléthon’, works to impede calculation by an overload of qualculative resources.

Does the thesis of the performativity of economics and the embeddedness of the economy in economics not have the effect of depoliticizing the question of the economy? Does it not implicitly grant e...

The aim of this article is to provide analytical tools for understanding why and how economic markets are becoming a growing source of political issues. We show, first, that the mechanisms of framing and overflowing, which characterize the functioning of markets, contribute towards the emergence of matters of concern and of concerned groups. We then explain why this proliferation of the social is accelerating, with particular emphasis on the establishment of a new innovation regime and the growing role of certain scientific disciplines and technologies. The multiplication of emergent concerned groups raises the question of what forms of market organization and political procedures could be designed and implemented to take their demands and expectations into account.

This article presents the implications, objectives and initial results of a current ethnographic research project on music lovers. It looks at problems of theory and method posed by such research if it is not conceived only as the explanation of external determinisms, relating taste to the social origins of the amateur or to the aesthetic properties of the works. Our aim is, on the contrary, from long interviews and observations undertaken with music lovers, mostly in the classical field, to concentrate on gestures, objects, mediums, devices and relations engaged in a form of playing or listening, which amounts to more than the actualization of a taste `already there', for they are redefined during the action, with a result that is partly uncertain. This is why amateurs' attachments and ways of doing things can both engage and form subjectivities, rather than merely recording social labels, and have a history, irreducible to that of the taste for works.

"Solve the technical problems first", we often hear, "then we'll deal with the market". The real history of innovations does not generally follow this simple schema; it is made of adaptations, series of trial and error and countless negotiations between numerous social actors. A genuine combat from which conquerors who know how to choose good representatives emerge.

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En trente ans, la « sociologie pragmatique » (aussi dénommée « sociologie des épreuves ») a produit des enquêtes empiriques touchant à l’ensemble des domaines de la vie sociale. En conformité avec les postulats théoriques qu’ils entendaient défendre, les chercheurs qui se reconnaissent dans ce courant sociologique ont mis au point des façons sensiblement nouvelles de conduire l’enquête, de collecter les données, d’explorer les terrains, de penser par cas et de se servir des controverses et des affaires comme points d’entrée dans l’ordre social et dans la question de sa problématique reproduction. L’objectif de cet article est de caractériser en dix points le style pragmatique en sociologie et de préciser ce que sont ses réquisits méthodologiques et ses conséquences pratiques dans la conduite du travail d’enquête.

Drawing on an ethnographic study of the installation and maintenance of Paris subway wayfinding system, this article attempts to discuss and specify previous claims that highlight stability and immutability as crucial aspects of material ordering processes. Though in designers’ productions (such as guidelines or graphic manuals), subway signs have been standardized and their consistency has been invested in to stabilize riders’ environment, they appear as fragile and transforming entities in the hands of maintenance workers. These two situated accounts are neither opposite nor paradoxical: they enact different versions of subway signs, the stabilization of which goes through the acknowledgment of their vulnerability. Practices that deal with material fragility are at the center of what we propose, following Annemarie Mol and Maria Puig de la Bellacasa, to term a care of things. Foregrounding such a care of things is a way to surface a largely overlooked dimension of material ordering and to renew how maintainability issues are generally tackled.

Le recours aux liens juridiques prend dans nos sociétés une importance grandissante. Il existe pourtant peu d’études empiriques sur la fabrique quotidienne du droit. Alors que la très grande technicité de la matière juridique réserve le droit aux juristes de profession, la sociologie l’explique trop rapidement par les rapports de forces qu’il ne ferait que dissimuler. La méthode ethnographique se trouve donc particulièrement bien ajustée à l’analyse du droit.C’est toute l’originalité de cette étude du Conseil d’État que propose Bruno Latour. Il porte une grande attention aux actes d’écriture, à la fabrication et à la manipulation des dossiers, aux interactions entre les membres, aux particularités du corps des conseillers d’État, et surtout à la diversité des ressorts qui permettent de bien juger. Par une grande qualité de style, l’auteur sait rendre compte de la technicité des jugements et renouer les nombreux liens entre le droit et cette société qui le nourrit et à laquelle il sert, en même temps, de garant.Après l’étude des laboratoires scientifiques, du discours religieux, de la parole politique, Bruno Latour continue, avec le droit, son programme d’anthropologie systématique des formes contemporaines de véridiction.